Weird requests Facebook employees get from family and friends

Adam Mosseri
Picture source: Business InsiderIt’s quite common for employees of famous tech companies to get weird questions from friends and family about their role in the company. Once they mildly understand your job profile, they bombard you with suggestions on how you can make the product better, for them if not for the entire user universe.

Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP for product management of News Feed, gets requests for specific controls, for instance: “I never want to see baby photos from high school friends again.” That's one variety of requests - and a pertinent one at that for several reasons (security in the wake of cyber abuse being just one of them).

“I get complaints about how sometimes they don’t see enough of one thing/topic on their News Feed. My mother once said she didn’t see enough of New York Times in her News Feed. I opened up Facebook for her and found out she wasn’t even following NYTimes. It was sort of an education for us. We should be better at connecting people with things they care about, so that’s on us not on her. That was at my birthday dinner, so I’ll never forget that one instance. But it's all over the map, really.”

Sometimes they get ideas for things they’re already building. “This was when we were working on creating the Reactions. One friend told me: ‘Look, I know you guys don’t want to create the ‘dislike' button, but how about making something to the effect of a 'superlike' button. In my head I was excitedly telling him ‘we’re doing it, plus we’re going to add all the other ones too.’ But I couldn’t tell him." He had to keep it to himself till the product was out.

Mosseri feels the fact that people have opinions about what they should do is a sign they’re finding value in the product and they’re using it. “Always happy to hear them out.” Have any odd suggestion for Facebook? You know what to do.